That will take a while.. Dont leave though because it will ask questions when it starts installing. My recommendation would be to replace the old configs with the new ones from the package maintainer when asked.

Post install:
After we are done, if you have done it like I did, from a terminal inside the gui, I would recommend just typing reboot or init 6 rather than trying to reboot the box via the gui... It did not work for me (which makes sense since most of gnome should be replaced at that point with the new-gnome).

What also is missing is gnome-control-center (for some reason) just install it and things can be configured again through it.

apt-get install gnome-control-center

apt-get autoremove

Good news, after the box is bounced things work as they should in the new gui and most importantly... I don't have to re-do my custom key-bindings because it kept them! Awesome :)

One of the unfortunate side-effects is that the mapping of devices has changed... my custom /etc/fstab had an external disk mapped at